Historical equipment catalog

This document records the first equipment slice for issue #65: weapons, shields, and armor intended for northern Germany in approximately 1544. The definitions are canonical typed records in content/items/catalog.yaml, compiled and embedded by adventuresim-core as described in Item definition authoring. The strategic game and the autoresolver consume the same persisted Item records; there are no special NPC-only item rules.

Scope and historical basis

The core professional infantry set is pike-and-shot equipment with halberds, sidearms, and armor. The German History in Documents and Images description of an approximately 1532--42 Landsknecht procession identifies the pike as the typical weapon. The Musée Lorrain's description of imperial Landsknecht equipment identifies pikes and halberds as the main bodies, supplemented by crossbowmen and arquebusiers, and notes Nuremberg mass production of infantry armor from the 1540s. The Met describes the halberd as especially associated with German Landsknechts, while noting the pike's role in massed sixteenth century formations.

The catalog also deliberately includes usable older stock: the baselard, barbute, sallet, visored sallet, mail garments, heater shield, and longbow. These are not presented as the fashionable or preferred 1544 battlefield kit; they are plausible inherited, stored, civilian, militia, or second-hand goods. No later sixteenth-century weapons or armor types are included simply for variety.

Inventory

The catalog intentionally has more weapons than armor entries (26 weapons to 24 armor pieces). Helmets receive eight entries because they were independently useful, highly varied, and more likely than a complete suit to persist in an armory.

Shield statistics preserve an actual handling tradeoff rather than making one catalog entry a strict upgrade. The round shield weighs 3.0 kg and provides 3.0 block, while the heater shield weighs 3.5 kg and provides 3.5 block. A player therefore chooses between lower burden and greater protection.

Representation and gameplay inference

The current item schema has one armor item per existing body slot, with no layering field. A mail_shirt, for example, is a chest-slot alternative to a brigandine rather than a simultaneous underlayer. This is an explicit temporary representation constraint, not a claim that period armor was worn in one layer. Adding layering, ammunition-specific projectile behavior, or rust belongs to later corrosion work.

Weapons carry an explicit distribution across Polearm, Axe, Bludgeon, Sword, Knife, Bow, Crossbow, Firearm, and Throw. Hybrid weapons split equally among their applicable tags: a halberd is Polearm/Axe/Bludgeon, a glaive is Polearm/Sword, and a hand axe is Axe/Knife. Combat averages the complete leaf checks by these weights. Knife is the short-weapon category, not a literal item name test.

Condition and repair

Weapons, shields, armor, and clothing are individual inventory instances. Their condition is a continuous five-bin bar: tier one is yellow-green, tier two yellow, tier three orange, tier four red, and tier five violet. Bins one and two are field-repairable, while bins three through five require a settlement craftsperson. Repairing bin n requires Smithing skill n for weapons, shields, and armor, or Tailoring skill n for clothing; field work is capped at bin two. Equipment quality is also its required maintenance skill, so a lesser smith can improve a masterwork item without restoring it completely. Damage can never occupy a tier above the item's quality: only quality-5 equipment can acquire violet tier-5 damage.

Clothing condition and Tailor repair are authoritative for damaged clothing instances, including seeded and imported damage. Ordinary clothing wear is not yet generated because clothing has no equipped/worn slot in the current item model; carried inventory is deliberately not worn down as if it were being worn. Routine wear should begin when clothing becomes equippable and can participate in the same contact and use paths as other equipment.

Quality uses the same 1--5 scale and is shown by the item name using the corresponding condition color, adjusted toward the fixed light interface text color for readability. Quality 3 is ordinary munition-grade work, quality 4 is the sort of commission a knight might order, and quality 5 is work for royalty or an esteemed hero. Munition grade is the neutral durability baseline. Quality 1--5 multiplies physical durability by 0.65, 0.80, 1.00, 1.25, and 1.60 respectively: the multiplier raises yield and fracture stress and inversely scales ordinary wear. Outside durability and its maintenance requirements, quality does not currently change combat statistics, coverage, handling, price, or any other item property.

The local catalog assigns several starter and demo items across all five qualities so the Wounded Demo fixture exercises each color and repair ceiling.

Equippable personal-inventory rows expose a checkbox backed by the item's catalog slot. Checking it equips that exact inventory instance, displacing any item already occupying the selected slot; unchecking it unequips the instance. Non-equipment rows keep a disabled checkbox.

Smithing uses the shared trained-skill curve: 5,000 invested hours is rank 2.5. Database upgrades split any legacy durable stack into quantity-one instances while retaining the original row ID for one piece, preserving equipped references; pooled party equipment is migrated the same way.

Rest resolves health first, then automatic field maintenance, then scheduled downtime. Field maintenance uses Tailoring for clothing and Smithing for other durable equipment. Settlement rest recommendations also include unfinished local repair orders. Services have independently seeded Weaponsmith, Armourer, and Tailor ratings of 3--5. Repair orders escrow the exact item instance, have an ETA, retain damage beyond the smith's skill, and never expire. A job's stable quote is ceil(base_value * repairable_damage), with a minimum of one gold; only bins within that smith's skill contribute. The quote is charged atomically from personal gold when the repaired item is retrieved. Bulk collection is deterministic: orders are considered by submission time and ID, and the affordable prefix is retrieved without skipping an earlier unaffordable job.

Impact damage uses each item's explicit yield, fracture, wear, and failure-share values. Ductile armor yields and dents readily but resists catastrophic fracture; stiff weapons resist ordinary wear but fail more sharply under a sufficiently large impact. Failure share models construction: one failed plate in segmented armor contributes less total damage than failure of a monolithic breastplate. Wear continuously reduces weapon precision and armor/shield handling, without reducing coverage for the sake of a single local hole.

Weights are kilograms. The documented object weights below anchor the scale; the other weights are bounded gameplay estimates for ordinary serviceable examples, rather than claimed measurements of a particular surviving object. base_value is a relative gameplay value that represents material and skilled labor. It is not a historical price series.

Combat-facing fields retain the meanings in Combat:

• accuracy is the weapon precision multiplier; values use the documented 0.5 club/hammer, 1.0 axe, 1.5 sword/spear, and 2.0 purpose-built precision calibration.
• penetration is its armor-resistance coefficient; blunt weapons use 0.1--0.5, ordinary edged weapons 1.0, spear and broadhead-like points 2.0, and narrow armor-seeking points 4.0.
• reach is metres. The present schema uses it for melee reach on melee items and autoresolve range on ranged items.
• resistance and padding are joules; coverage, flexibility, and range_of_motion are 0--1. Plate favors resistance and coverage, mail loses resistance under penetrating attacks through its high flexibility, and padded clothing favors padding and mobility.

These are deterministic gameplay inferences from the documented combat model and physical construction, not claims that period sources supplied those exact numbers. The catalog test rejects duplicate IDs, placeholder bot_ entries, impossible slots, absent damage types, out-of-range armor values, and a weapons-to-armor ratio contrary to the intended inventory.

Sources

• German History in Documents and Images: marching Landsknechts, c. 1532--42
• Musée Lorrain: equipment of two imperial Landsknechts
• The Met: German halberd
• The Met: German breastplate, dated 1540, with documented 3.515 kg weight
• The Met: German Augsburg burgonet, c. 1525--30, with documented 2.332 kg weight
• The Met: Augsburg breastplate with tassets, c. 1530
• The Met: German helmet, c. 1535
• Wallace Collection: German sallet, c. 1515, explicitly a declining form